Digital Rights Groups, Trade Orgs Back YouTube In Viacom Lawsuit
- by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, April 13, 2010
The organizations, including the American Library Association, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, NetCoalition (which includes Amazon, eBay and Yahoo) argue that YouTube is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions, which generally say that copies are immune from liability when users upload infringing material, provided the material is removed upon request.
If Viacom’s argument that YouTube should be liable is accepted by the court, they argue, “the profusion of online services that have benefited the public (as well as future ventures) would be imperiled by the threat of multi-billion dollar statutory damages awards.�
Some of these organizations don't believe in private property; others are pursuing their own corporate interests in benefiting from free content. All resist any effort to protect the rights of consumers OR creators. This is the same old bashing of other people's rights. Particularly absurd is the section of the brief that says that the market is working because piracy is not "reliable enough" and that google's filtering (done following the filing of Viacom's lawsuit) is proof that without Viacom's lawsuit, Google would have filtered. Does that mean that the rule of law should be that piracy is ok until it gets better? Given the clear intentional copyright infringement and billions in profits - what conduct would they find to be infringing?